


Turn Out the Lights

by thatsweetmysteryoflife



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-28
Updated: 2012-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-31 21:09:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/348391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsweetmysteryoflife/pseuds/thatsweetmysteryoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson had never turned off the lights in the flat before. Now everything has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John

**Author's Note:**

> This has been writing itself in my head for a very long time. Just before Reichenbach aired in January, it started clamoring to be written down. This is my best approximation of that story. I originally intended to write this as a triptych, but after a long time, I think it's best as it is.

_In the end, the only thing that matters is how we are remembered._

_I will always remember him as the best and wisest man I have ever known._

_I will always remember him._

_—John Watson_

_\----_

In all the years he had lived at 221B Baker Street, John Watson had never once turned off the lights downstairs before he went up to bed. He honestly couldn't remember a night since he had first moved in when Sherlock hadn't been awake as he trudged his way up the stairs towards the bedrooms. When he really thought about it, he wasn't really sure if he'd ever seen the man actually sleep. He was always moving, always thinking, always doing  _something_. Stillness was a completely alien concept to one such as Sherlock Holmes. To be kind to his flatmate's odd hours, John always left the light on. Without fail, the light would be on when he descended the stairs in the morning.

He had a sneaking suspicion that it had never once been turned off.

\----

This couldn't be happening.

" _I'm a fake_."

" _Goodbye_ , _John_."

John held the phone to his ear, too numb to do anything but splutter as he tried to force the words out of his mouth.  _No_ , he wanted to shout,  _no, I don't know what you're doing but you're lying, you're lying to me, Sherlock, I know you are, I just don't know why you're doing it, why are you doing this, Sherlock, why are you doing this to_ ** _me_** **—**

Something inside of him was clenched, clenched so tightly he couldn't breathe. He tried and tried and tried to speak, all the while feeling that inside him, something was clenching, something was cracking, something was breaking—

Something was breaking.

Someone was falling.

A painful ache swelled in his chest and he began to run as he had never ran before, hurtling towards the building as a scream was savagely ripped from his soul.

" _ **SHERLOCK!**_ "

\----

He remembers feeling nothing. Staring out at the world passing so rapidly in front of his eyes, and feeling nothing. Like he was living in a dream, like all he had to do was to squeeze his eyes shut and open them again and he'd be waking up in his own bed. There were too many lights, too many sounds. Far,  _far_ too many people. There was just too much around him, too many things distracting him from the feeling that was rising up from deep inside.

He put his head in his hands and began to laugh. A high-pitched, crazed sound that tore its way out of his throat and shook his entire body. He was only dimly aware of a crowd of paramedics clustered around him, barking out harsh commands. He could only laugh and laugh until the tears streamed down his face.

He had failed. He hadn't saved him. He  _couldn't_ have saved him.

He was alone.

\----

The nightmares came back with a vengeance the first night he returned home.

He hadn't dreamed with such intensity for months, but there he was once again, standing on the road, unable to move. Watching him fall. Over and over and over again, he watched as the greatest man he had ever known spread his arms wide and deliberately toppled forward into thin air.

And he could do nothing but watch as the scene replayed itself in his head.

Sometimes he watched from his own body on the ground. Other times, he had a bird's eye view of the body as he plummeted, an angry knot of limbs and flapping fabric, towards the unforgiving ground.

On especially bad nights, he saw the impact.

Every time, he woke up screaming.

\----

_ One week later _

There were two things that stood out in his memory about the funeral. The first was the sheer number of people that attended. The church, randomly selected (probably by Mycroft, which likely meant that it wasn't random at all) was filled to the rafters with  _people_. The force from Scotland Yard, people whose cases Sherlock had solved, fans of his work, and many more. Even after everything, the lies and slander and deception, there were still so many  _people_.

There were too many of them. None of them understood. They didn't get it, not at all. They didn't know who Sherlock  _was_ , what sort of a person he had been. Had been. He had to get used to saying that. Sherlock was a thing of the past, now. He was a  _was_ , no longer an  _is_. The world held no Sherlock.

The world was empty to him.

Absently, he wondered when he had become so possessive of Sherlock. It didn't take him long to realize the answer was simple.

Always.

The second thing was Mycroft.

John had been sitting in the first pew of the empty sanctuary long before the service began, looking like a ghost that had been unceremoniously stuffed into a black suit. His eyes were blank and stared straight ahead, doing everything they could to avoid looking at the coffin. It was closed. Mycroft had asked him (though he didn't quite know why) whether he had wanted it open or closed during the service, and without hesitation, he had said flatly, "Closed."

It wasn't Sherlock. Not anymore. The bashed and mangled  _thing_  inside the coffin wasn't Sherlock. Sherlock was all brains and energy and thought and light and brilliance and rampant arrogance and dashing about and inappropriate glee and genius and all those maddening little things that made him wonderful. All that was gone.

In the midst of his daze, Mycroft had snuck up on him. John had looked up to find Sherlock's elder brother standing next to him in the chapel aisle, with what looked like the closest thing to emotion that he had ever seen on the face of a Holmes. Out of courtesy, John stood to greet him. It was the first time he had actually seen him in person for weeks.

"Mycroft, I—" He was abruptly cut off.

"I don't have much time. I diverted all surveillance from this area for two minutes exactly," Mycroft said in a rush. When John started to ask why, he was met with a firm shake of the head. "John, listen to me. I need you to hear this, and I need you to understand." He dropped his umbrella heedlessly to the floor, and his hands came up and grasped John by his shoulders. John took a step back in surprise, but Mycroft followed.

_"You did so much,"_ he said passionately. "You  _changed_ him, when we thought he was lost to us forever. You made him different. He listened to you. He  _cared_  for you. You made him want to do what was right, instead of what  _he_ thought was right. I never imagined anyone could do that to him, but you did." He stopped, and drew a ragged breath, and John almost thought he spied the beginnings of—were those _tears?_ —in his eyes. "You made him better than he was. He was great, but you made him  _good_. You made him whole. And for that, I am so much more grateful than I can ever say." He shook John by his shoulders, his hands tightening into the fabric of his suit. " _Thank you,_ John Watson. You did more than the impossible. You brought him back. To us. To me.  _Thank_ you."

Mycroft released John from his grasp, picked up his umbrella, and without another word, walked from the sanctuary, his back unbowed.

_But this is my fault_ , John wanted to scream at the retreating figure.  _I did this. He did this because of_ _ **me**_ _._

It was much later before he realized the full import of Mycroft's opening words. He had diverted all surveillance from the two of them, alone with a coffin in a cold sanctuary.

He hadn't wanted anyone to see him cry.

\----

_ Three months later _

People said he had been holding up remarkably well, given the circumstances. They didn't quite understand.

John Watson was a soldier. Soldiers did not let themselves be emotionally compromised. Soldiers did not cry.

And up until exactly three months after that day, that statement held true.

But it's the little things that hurt the most.

Upon urging from Mrs. Hudson, he had begun to try to tidy things up around the flat. He hadn't touched a thing in all the time he had been there, preferring to leave the stacks of paper and odd bits of evidence and experiments exactly where they were. It made it easier, in a way. That way, he could at least pretend that he wasn't alone.

Things were always worse when he was alone.

He closed his eyes as his hand touched the dusty wood of the door to Sherlock's room. He hadn't dared enter it since he had returned to the flat, battered and bandaged and still in a state of shock three months ago. With a sharp intake of breath, John twisted the knob and stepped in the room.

Immediately, his senses were assaulted with  _Sherlock_.

Everything in the room  _looked_ like Sherlock,  _felt_ like Sherlock, reminded him in all the small ways of the things that had made up Sherlock. The worst part, or perhaps the best, was the smell. Faintly dusty, like wool and old papers or old bookbinding glue, with the undercurrents of something vaguely spicy paired with something faintly sweet and faintly bitter. It was the smell of Sherlock, the smell John inhaled every time he swished by in his long black coat, the smell that told John everything was right with the world.

He inhaled it, nostrils flared as wide as they could go, trying to catch every last whiff before it was gone. As soon as he opened the door, it had begun to dissipate and was fading fast. He inhaled again, and felt something lurch within his chest as he realized it was barely there.

Then it was gone.

Something raw and dark and ugly clawed its way up from the pit of his stomach, and emerged from his mouth as a stifled sob. With a convulsive motion, he tried to hold it back, force it back, keep it at bay. It was relentless. It was overwhelming. It threatened to break him.

He collapsed on the dusty bed and, for the first time, let himself go.

John Watson, soldier, broke down and wept.

\----

The time passed slowly on his own. He had once said to his therapist, long before anything ever began, that nothing happened to him anymore. He had long since stopped returning her calls.

His prediction was only now coming true.

He got up every morning, went to work every day, came home every night. He would sit in silence in the sitting room for an hour or so, and wearily trudge upstairs to bed. Every day was the same. Nothing ever changed.

His life had become his way of grieving. What little left that could be called a life was empty and flat. There was no light in his life, no laughter. There were no tears. There was only nothing.

He would have bad days, days where he felt an immeasurable weight pressing down on his chest, making it hard for him to catch his breath. There were days where he would walk through life, feeling nothing at all. The most notable thing he felt was the absence of feeling. It was as if he had lost a part of himself so great that he could never heal the wound. It would scab, and scar, but never heal. There would always be a hole.

A heart cannot survive for long without a body.

\----

_ Two years later _

John sat in his chair by the window, as he did every night. He was holding some patient notes he had made earlier in the day, but wasn't even trying to keep up the pretense of looking at them. Instead, he was gazing at the skull, still keeping watch from its perch on the mantle.

"I still miss you, you know," he said conversationally to the skull. "It still feels strange to me to come home to an empty flat." He sighed and ruffled the papers back and forth. He had been having conversations with the skull more and more often as time went by. It  _was_ an excellent conversationalist, anyway.

"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn't come along," John said, as he put down his patient notes and picked up the evening newspaper to scan the headlines. "I wonder if you'd still be here, messing about with your experiments and driving people mad with your brilliant mind. Probably. Maybe. I don't know." He closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the chair.

"I miss you," he said again, quietly. "It's been two years. And I still miss you. Silly of me, but I do. I can't help it." Even more softly, he added, "You should still be here. You should still be alive. But you're not, are you? You're...you're dead. You're...dead. You're dead, Sherlock. And I'm not." He smiled, a cheerless grin that did little more than bare his teeth. "Isn't that funny? This time, the sidekick lived but the hero died." He paused as the grin faded. "But you would have appreciated being called an antihero more than a hero. You always hated that word. You tried to tell me so many times you weren't a hero." He closed his eyes and shook his head at himself. "I didn't ever listen."

The clock struck the hour in the hallway and John suddenly realized it was getting very late. He sighed and tossed the paper down beside him, then stretched and stood up. Walking over to the mantle, he rested one callused hand on the smooth surface of the skull.

"I wish you were here," he admitted. He stood over the mantle for a long minute, then drew his hand away as he walked towards the door. "Good night, Sherlock," he called over his shoulder.

When he reached the top of the stairs (seventeen steps, he remembered, as Sherlock had told him once and he would now never forget), he paused. He looked down the stairs behind him, into the still-lit living room. Something inside of him, so small and crushed and broken for so long, finally crumbled into dust. He closed his eyes and, with a small breath, started to let go.

"Good bye, Sherlock," he whispered brokenly.

And for the first time, he turned out the lights.


	2. Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is Sherlock's side of the story.

_One more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't be..._ **_dead_ ** _._

He wasn't.

His brain was still racing; his heart, or what was left of it, was still beating. But there was something inside of him, something he didn't quite understand, that was no longer with him.

He watched John walk away from the grave— _his_ grave—back straight, gait steady. Carrying on, like the soldier he truly was. Standing tall while internally, everything crumbled. His name, that familiar, beloved name, rose unbidden to his lips, but he held it back, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip in the effort to stay silent. He could not call out. He could not tell him. As the coppery blood he had drawn flooded his mouth, he knew. He  _had_  to die.

He closed his eyes and felt himself fade into the shadows.

Sherlock Holmes would be no more.

\----

Sherlock had never been one for turning off the lights.

He slept so infrequently, and kept such odd hours when awake, that he had early on deemed it quite impractical to spend the time switching lights on or off. During the short time he had lived on his own in 221B, he didn't turn off a single light. Once John had moved in, he had made slightly more of an effort to turn lights off as he left rooms, but rarely remembered. The living room lights had only been off once that he could recall, and that had been when one of his experiments had ended up reacting negatively with the power grid of the building.

A few days after his "death," he had been unable to resist walking by Baker Street one last time before leaving the country. It was stupid, and unsafe, but he didn't care. Hidden beneath newly ginger-colored hair and a bulky hooded sweatshirt, he gazed up at the flat as he passed, smiling without joy at the light streaming from the windows.

John had left the lights on.

\----

_ One week later _

Sherlock was in Spain when he first heard the news about his own funeral. Predictably, he saw it in the tabloid carried by another passenger on a bus. When he picked up his own copy, he was amused to see that it had, in fact, been very well attended.  _Apparently some people don't really care how fake they say I am_ , he chuckled to himself. The grin that had been forming on his face stilled and died as he caught a glimpse of a small blurred figure in the corner of one particular photograph.

It was impossible to distinguish the face, but he was of medium height, clad in a dark suit, and averting his face from the camera. He was leaning on a cane.

The paper lay in a tiny crumpled heap on the cafe table as the man in the long coat strode away.

\----

_ Three months later _

He had, so far, tracked down thirty-four members of Moriarty's gang and ensured their capture. World travel was becoming boring, as he crossed Europe time and time again following each strand of the web. A few he had himself brought to the police, and one he had personally brought to justice. Quite literally, in fact. He had been one of Moriarty's snipers. Specifically, Moriarty's  _London_ snipers.

Sherlock had taken great pleasure in bashing him unconscious.

There was nothing, no one else, for him now. Nothing but the hunt. Nothing but the next strand, the next chase, the scent of blood. He could not afford to be distracted. The body he inhabited was just a fragile shell, containing a burning mass of determined focus. He would succeed. He  _would_. He  _had_ to.

But sometimes, when he lost that focus, he went back. Back to London, back to where it all began. Back to see the reason why he was fighting, why he was running. Why he was dead. But he forbade himself from anything more than simply watching. He had to be very strict with himself about that.

Sometimes it was hard.

\----

Soon after he had left England for the first time, he had quietly bought the flat across the street from 221B. It had remained empty since Moriarty had planted those bombs so long ago, and the owners were only too happy to get it off their hands. Naturally, they had no idea who the buyer  _really_ was. Mycroft had been most accommodating in that regard.

He would sit in the dark, empty room, and watch through the window. Watch the rooms where he used to live, and watch the only man in the world he trusted. Just to sit there, in silence, and watch, was torture enough. But he wouldn't have traded it for the world.

He had traded his life to keep this man safe. He would trade the world to ensure that safety.

Two months after buying the flat, he hacked into Mycroft's surveillance systems. It was strangely comforting to him to hear John's voice, even emanating from a set of cheap speakers. Mycroft would have scolded him, had he known. Sherlock didn't care. Just to hear John, to close his eyes and imagine he was speaking to him, imagine that everything was still right with the world, was enough.

He had been undeniably startled when John actually  _had_ spoken to him one day.

After an initial moment of stunned panic, he knew he had been wrong. John hadn't been talking to him. Not really. At least, not the him that was sitting in the rooms across the street from 221B. No, John was speaking to another Sherlock. A Sherlock only he could see. And for the first time, Sherlock felt a pang of something he didn't recognize. ( _It couldn't be emotion_ , he told himself rationally.  _Emotions are useless. I've deleted them. No, it couldn't be that._ )

John was speaking to Sherlock.

He whipped out his phone before he realized it and had dashed off a text to Mycroft.

_**Look after him, will you? -SH** _

He was already out the door before he got a response.

_**Of course. -MH** _

It was little consolation. The damage had already been done.

He ran through the darkened streets of London, fleeing something he didn't yet understand. As his feet slapped the pavement, one thought rang through his mind:

_John, what've I done to you?_

_\----_

He lost himself in his work.

Man after woman after man fell into his traps, and he kept working. He barely slept anymore. Dark circles etched their way under his ice-blue eyes, and made his face their permanent home. He rarely ate. It didn't matter to him. None of that was important anymore.

The web had to fall.

He had been foolish enough to allow himself to care. And since he had absolutely refused to abandon his foolishness, he was determined to see the web crumble, man by man, until it was no more.

He had sworn he would keep him safe. And he would do anything, everything, to make sure of it.

It only took a visit to London to remind himself of that. It only took one visit to remind him of the pain.

The pain of being away from London was nothing compared to the pain he felt as he sat, an invisible observer, in the empty room. As he watched the man who he, the great Sherlock Holmes, had dared to care for, and in caring, had destroyed. And he could do nothing to save him.

 _I'm coming, John,_ he promised silently as he watched the broken man pace back and forth across the room.  _I'm coming home. Soon. As soon as this is over. As soon as you're safe. Only when you're safe._

_I promise._

He would make this right.

\----

_ Two years later _

He had been in London for a little over a week, as his quarry had fled there after evading Sherlock's initial trap. No matter. He would be caught soon enough.

His London visits had fallen into a sort of pattern. Every night, as he returned to the empty flat, he left the rooms dark and switched on his equipment to hear the familiar sounds of John puttering around the flat and talking to himself.

Sherlock had taken to responding to his one-sided conversations. He figured it was only fair. After all, John spoke to the skull because he had no Sherlock. Sherlock spoke to the silence because he had no John.

He put his headphones on.

 _"I still miss you, you know,"_  John admitted from across the street.  _"It still feels strange to me to come home to an empty flat."_  It couldn't be any stranger than to be eavesdropping on a conversation in which you were technically a participant.  _"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn't come along,"_  John continued, and Sherlock saw him pick up the newspaper from beside his chair.  _"I wonder if you'd still be here, messing about with your experiments and driving people mad with your brilliant mind. Probably. Maybe. I don't know."_

"Oh,  _John_ ," whispered Sherlock to the silent room. "I would be dead without you. Truly dead."  _I wish you knew that._

 _"I miss you."_  John's voice cracked audibly, even through the speakers.  _"It's been two years. And I still miss you. Silly of me, but I do. I can't help it."_

"And I you, John."

_"You should still be here. You should still be alive. But you're not, are you? You're...you're dead. You're... **dead**. You're dead, Sherlock. And I'm not."_

"Not for much longer, John. Once this is over, I won't be dead any more. I promise."

 _"Isn't that funny? This time, the sidekick lived but the hero died."_  John stopped speaking, and Sherlock rubbed his aching eyes with his fingers.

"You were never just my sidekick, John. Never. You have always been more than that. And I was, and am still, not a hero."

_"But you would have appreciated being called an antihero more than a hero. You always hated that word. You tried to tell me so many times you weren't a hero. I didn't ever listen."_

"I'm not a hero, John. I never was. I'm just a man. A brilliant man, but a man all the same. Nothing more."

Across the street, John stood and walked over to place his hand gently on the skull, resting in its familiar place on the mantle.

 _"I wish you were here,"_  he said once more. Sherlock watched as he stood over the mantle for a long minute, then turned and walked towards the door.  _"Good night, Sherlock."_

"Good night, John."

He pulled off his headphones, and his hand hovered over the switch. John had gone upstairs, and Sherlock knew from experience he would hear no more tonight. Still his hand lingered, unwilling to turn off the equipment. It was stupidly sentimental, he knew, but every night it grew more and more difficult to switch it off. With a small exhalation, he shook his head in exasperation at his own stupidity, and drew himself up and out of the chair to gaze out the window at the golden light streaming from the windows of 221B. He smiled at a sudden memory, but there was no joy in his face. John still left the lights on, even after all this time.

A muffled whisper came from the desk and he whirled around in alarm at the sudden noise, but no more sound issued from his headphones.

When he turned to face the window once more, the sitting room was dark.

John had turned out the lights.

He frantically rushed over to the equipment and jammed his headphones back onto his head, hurriedly rewinding the tape. What had he said? Why had John turned out the lights,  _now,_ after two years of still leaving them on, as he always had?  _Why?_

He caught the whisper and rewound, increasing the volume as high as it went. As the words became audible, he felt like someone had punched him in the chest.

_"Goodbye, Sherlock."_

John had said goodbye.

He fell back into his chair, his hands automatically steepling together and coming up to touch the tip of his nose, his fingers resting gently on his lips. He closed his eyes slowly, as if even that small movement pained him.

John had said goodbye. To him. To Sherlock. To the one man who cared enough to die for him, and couldn't even tell him so.

He was well and truly alone.

Though no man could see it, a single drop coursed its way down the cheek of the world's only consulting detective.

In a broken and shaking voice, he whispered, "Goodbye, John."

There were no lights left to turn off.


End file.
